Taft-Hartley

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Mar 12 13:50:47 PST 2001


[interesting that Carter paved the way for Reagan even here...]

"Death by Lethal Injunction: National Emergency Strikes Under the

Taft-Hartley Act"

BY: MICHAEL H. LEROY

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations

JOHN H. JOHNSON

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations

Paper ID: Bureau of Econ. & Bus. Research Working Paper No.

00-0116

Date: July 25, 2000

Contact: MICHAEL H. LEROY

Email: Mailto:m-leroy at staff.uiuc.edu

Postal: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations

504 East Armory Avenue

Champaign, IL 61820-6297 USA

Phone: 217-244-4092

Co-Auth: JOHN H. JOHNSON

Email: Mailto:jhjohnsn at uiuc.edu

Postal: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations

Room 213

504 East Armory Avenue

Champaign, IL 61820-6297 USA

Paper Requests:

Contact Information Resource Retrieval Center, 128 Library,

1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana IL 61801 USA. Fax:(217)244-0398;

Phone:(217)333-1958 mailto:irrc at uiuc.edu. Basic fee is $10.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/irrc/

ABSTRACT:

The Taft-Hartley Act gives the President and federal courts

extraordinary power to enjoin lawful strikes that pose a threat

to national health or safety. Although rarely used, this power

has great impact. We show that Taft-Hartley injunctions lowered

public support for unions by portraying them as selfish economic

actors who were harmful to the nation, and altered the balance

of bargaining power in critical strikes, usually to the

detriment of unions.

We trace these injunctions to their common law antecedents

from the 1820s. We show that courts routinely abused their

equitable powers in labor disputes. Our research shows that

Taft-Hartley courts have failed to avoid this pitfall. They (1)

failed to exercise judicial powers, (2) relied on distorted

assumptions to support injunctions, (3) interpreted national

health to mean national inconvenience, (4) favored the

government - and by extension, powerful employers - by granting

eighty percent of the petitions for injunctions, and (5) issued

impractical orders.

Although the last Taft-Hartley injunction was issued in the

1970s, this public policy remains relevant in two respects. When

major strikes affect the nation - most recently, the 1997

Teamsters strike at UPS - presidents respond to growing public

pressure by threatening to invoke this power. Although

politically expedient, this power undermines a main tenet of the

National Labor Relations Act that permits unions to strike in

support of their bargaining proposals. In addition, our research

questions a current theory explaining that the sharp decline in

strikes resulted from President Reagan's use of the striker

replacement doctrine in the PATCO strike. By showing that

President Carter's use of Taft-Hartley in the 1977-1978 national

coal strike caused the first sharp drop in strikes, and by

demonstrating that this law was intended to impair this right,

we show that the presidency plays a more complex role in the

dying right to strike.



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